Pound, Ford and ‘Prose’: The Making of a Modern Poet

Abstract

‘I believe’, Swinburne wrote in 1875, ‘you know my theory that nothing which can possibly be as well said in prose ought ever to be said in verse’. The clarity of the distinction between prose and verse, though in practice a little wobbly, was felt to be actual in Victorian critical thought. It was not the long narrative poems (Maud, The Ring and the Book, Sordello, The Idylls of the King, The Prelude, Amours de Voyage) which undermined the distinction, but the exquisite poëmes en prose of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. To blur the lines between die different kinds of art one wrote poems titled ‘Symphony in Yellow’ (Wilde), ‘Pastel’ (Symons), ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (Mallarmé), titled paintings ‘Nocturne’ (Whistler), or created an art form designed to absorb and surpass all others (Wagner). In Marius the Epicurean Walter Pater proved that there was no viable distinction between the language of poetry and language of prose, and in so doing created a language which was richly and grotesquely unique. To talk of poetry in terms of dance, music and painting was to neutralize the pressure of moral judgement, but this did not efface the idea of the ‘poetic’ as something, in some sense, distinct from prose. Though the lines between the two were softened, they did not disappear, becoming, for the following generation, an increasingly problematic aspect of their own art.